The Evolution of Morality
I’ve been an atheist all my life. I went to college to become a scientist. I am an obnoxious skeptic. I was very confident in my worldview – that is until life got hard enough for me to question everything I had previously been so confident in. It seems suffering is the most effective way to gain perspective.
I now realize I have been arguing against a straw man version of religion my whole life — like teasing a child for believing in Santa Claus. If Santa doesn’t actually exist, or any of the supernatural occurences in religious mythology for that matter, it doesn’t actually make their intent any less valid. I had been raised to trust only empirical evidence; great for discovering truths about the physical world, but terrible for figuring out just how one ought to act in the world. Kids typically continue behaving even after discovering Santa isn’t real because by that point they have formed more sophisticated justificaitons for being a good person. Like all religions, the Santa story is a shortcut to truth: be good, good things happen. Put another way, one could simply read that E=MC², or conduct a scientific experiment or provide extensive mathematical proofs showing that E=MC², and in either case they would be correct in asserting that claim.
If you approach religion metaphorically, you can analyze its value without getting bogged down by its lack of empirical evidence. This is no different than appreciating the value of any work of art or literature. Religion is the study of how and why humans should live their lives. What is truly fascinating is how well the stories told in religion match up with the story of human evolution. Religion describes the human condition. Evolution describes the conditions by which we became human.
According to Darwin, the ability to successfully procreate is the behavior by which a species is ultimately judged; survival of the species is the ultimate reward and extinction is the ultimate punishment. It is no wonder that so much of the focus in Christianity and other religions is put on the sanctity of life, marriage, and procreation.
Take the story of creation, for example. Adam lives harmoniously in the Garden of Eden. God’s one rule for Adam is not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge or he will “certainly die”. Curious, that — is knowledge not one of our most valued attributes? Perhaps this represents the period just before we became self-aware; a period when we — like all animals — were blissfully unaware of our own mortality. It isn’t death that God is warning Adam about, but the awareness of death. It is not obvious which is worse.
God then gives Adam a companion in the form of Eve. She is made from Adam’s body — “that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh”. This is a direct reference to consummation and reproduction and an astonishingly accurate and beautiful representation of the biology of procreation.
One of the most striking aspects of the Creation Story is the amount of humor it contains. Were it an objective record of fact what would be the purpose of humor? Scientific and historical records are devoid of humor because they measured purely by their empirical value. Art and literature, on the other hand, derive their value from popularity and longevity. The best works evoke the full range of human emotion and illuminate truths that we all agree on but cannot scientifically prove. The snake, recognizing the nuance in God’s warning to Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit, assures Eve that she and Adam won’t die if they eat it and in fact will gain greater sight and be “as God Himself, knowing good and evil”.
Eve’s desire for knowledge and material wealth gets the better of her and she eats the fruit. This is such a key aspect of the story, because of how well it lines up with our evolutionary history. We share a long and contentious evolutionary past with snakes. In fact, it has been shown that strong stereoscopic eyesight in primates is very highly correlated with the presence of snakes in a given environment. Snakes did in fact “give” us our vision, just as the story of Creation says. Astonishing.
Why do Adam and Eve cover themselves upon eating the forbidden fruit? Our evolutionary arms race with the environment led to our self-awareness. As all men can attest to, there is nothing in the universe that will make you feel more self-conscious than women. Women are the selecting mechanisms in human evolution. They are the gatekeepers to man’s survival. They are nature.
Eve was attracted to knowledge. Female humans selected mates based on intelligence. As a result, our brains exploded in size and sophistication over a relatively short period of time. This led to women to give birth much earlier in the gestation process, in turn requiring them to spend more and more of their time caring for their underdeveloped infants. God says to Eve, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This isn’t a misogynist threat—it’s an evolutionary reality.
Because of this increased burden, women needed to rely on men to provide for her and her children to a much greater degree. Humans became more stationary and less nomadic. Eve “ate from the Tree of Knowledge” by selecting increasingly intelligent mates, and Adam was a willing accomplice because, well, men want sex. Therefore, he must leave the Garden with Eve in order to take care of her for all of eternity.
God says of Adam: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” Self-awareness is our burden. Most animals act purely on instinct and don’t think about the nature of their being. They lack the capacity to understanding their own suffering or recognizing the fleetingness of pleasure, and although they do not know that they will die some day, they do not know they won’t live forever.
While all other animals tend to live perfectly in sync with their environments and the world at large, we seem to live apart from it and out of alignment with it. Sure, we can dominate nature and bend her to our will, but we must also contend with the ultimate pointlessness of doing so, not to mention the unintended side-effects. Suffering is only bearable when it’s justified in some way. Pointless suffering is hell. It seems our greatest threat is no longer the environment, but our awareness of our existence and the ever present threat of Nihilism. Nihilism is the path to hell.
In addition to physical tool use, we gained the ability to pass collective knowledge down from generation to generation. Art, dance, song, drama, literature, philosophy, and religion are the tools we have employed to face the challenge of existential crisis. This is completely unique to homo-sapiens and an incredible result of our large brains. We have been grappling with trying to understand the essential rules for being human for millions of years. The ideas that were most likely to be passed down were the ones that resonated most with the fittest members of our species; that is, the ones that were the most entertaining. These metanarratives are the collectively agreed upon interpretations of the natural laws our species must follow in order to survive in perpetuity. Stories that appealed to less fit humans faded out of existence because they had no children onto which to pass their favorite stories. In other words, morality evolved in the same way our biology evolved.
In order for knowledge to pass down from generation to generation through the low-bandwidth of art, dance, song, and story, it was necessary to condense as much meaning into each story as possible; that is, the information agreed upon as “most true” as it pertained to lessons about how to survive and thrive. When you tell a coworker about how your weekend went, you tend to leave out the details about how many minutes you spent brushing your teeth and cut straight to the meaningful gist. If your weekend was sufficiently interesting your coworker may relay it to other coworkers, and perhaps embellish or misrepresent it to some degree, and perhaps not even consciously. Done over a long enough period of time, the stories that endure are likely to be packed diamond tight with valuable information, much like the story of Creation is, while simultaneously including fantastical and supernatural qualities like any good story typically contains.
Do these stories have staying power because they contain truth? What is truth, for that matter? From a rational, scientific perspective, truth is measured empirically using the scientific method. This does not work from a pragmatic, metaphysical perspective. Metaphysical truth is measured intuitively, both on a collective level and an individual level. For instance, you can’t prove scientifically why you like the books or movies you do; you just do. Often the lessons you learn from art and stories seem more real to you than the cold, dry facts you read about in science text books. What this implies is that truth and meaning are inexorably linked, or perhaps even one in the same. Truth without meaning is useless; meaning without truth is dogma.
Scientific truths about the material world is something we take for granted in today’s society. Metaphysical truths about the meaning of our existence is something people took for granted in past societies. Whereas materialistic survival seemed to be the greatest challenge facing humanity in the past, existential crisis appears to be the greatest threat facing humanity today. In the same way we don’t worry about how to survive off the land and fend off predators, people in the past didn’t worry about why good and evil things happen and what the point of all this suffering is. We traded material problems for metaphysical problems. The inflection point was The Enlightenment. We ate from the Tree of Knowledge when we discovered the scientific method. Like Eve, our obsession for technological progress and scientific discovery has been driven by our desire for comfort, safety, and stability.
Although science is supposed to be a completely impartial and analytical endeavor, our ultimate goal in practicing science appears to be to eliminate disease, extend our lifespans indefinitely, and eradicate all human suffering by providing an abundance of wealth to all of humanity. Like the alchemists of the past, we seek the fabled Philosopher’s Stone. Because those goals seem so well aligned with our survival, we very quickly started to abandon religion and philosophy as the primary tools we rely upon to seek truth.
The problem, however, is that science is only a means to an end, not an end itself. It can only tell us about what the physical world is, not how we ought to act in it. But worse than that, the more we learn about the universe, the more questions we are confronted with, and the more insignificant, powerless, and pointless we start to feel. In other words, it’s accelerating our fall into Nihilism.
I fear the Western world is going through a collective existential crisis. Birth rates are dropping so quickly in secular first world countries that they’re negative in some cases. Our obsession with material wealth and hedonism is running out of control and resulting in an explosion of health and mental problems. Depression is sharply rising and medications do little to prevent it. And more recently, social and political unrest is reaching a boiling point.
Is it any surprise that these trends are so strongly correlated with the Death of God and the rapid secularization of Western Society? Is it any surprise that Communist Russia fell into hell so quickly and completely after the Orthodox Church was banished? When society falls prey Nihilism, all suffering become unbearable no matter how productive the outputs of that suffering are, and what follows is a resentment of that suffering and, eventually, of existence itself.
The logical and merciful course of action becomes to attempt to diminish suffering as much as possible before we die. This is a fools errand. Suffering is the human condition and biologically necessary for survival. If you can’t eliminate suffering, and all suffering is without purpose, the next most logical and merciful conclusion to reach is to accelerate the demise of as many people as possible. After all, there is no suffering in death. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
The religious presupposition that life has transcendent value is vital to our survival. What’s more, it is aligned with our evolution, biology, and psychology. It is the path to heaven and protection from hell. You might ask, as I once did, why life here on earth is held with such high regard in Christianity when the ultimate goal is for us to reach Heaven. It seemed to me to be the ultimate deception, but now I think I understand the wisdom in it.
Much like any child eventually understands that the presents from Santa aren’t the actual reward being good kids, it’s time we understood that a supernatural heaven isn’t the actual reward for being virtuous adults. In fact, I think this is something most secular people already understand, but most have not thought deeply about what the actual reward is. Heaven is referred to as the place we go “after life”, that is, after our life ends. Perhaps it is a physical place our souls travel to after we die, but suppose instead it’s actually another clever twist of semantics, much like God’s warning to Adam that he will die if he eats from the Tree of Knowledge. From a scientific point of view, all we know about what happens after someone dies is that the rest of us continue living.
Taken literally, Heaven is the continuation of existence “after” our “life” ends. More succinctly, Heaven is the eternal continuation of our species. To be part of it, you must make your contribution toward that aim. You do this indirectly by doing your part to ensure that future generations have the best chance for survival. You do this directly by having children of your own. Your genetics are you, therefore your children are you. But they’re not exactly you. As Darwin discovered, each generation has its own mark of random genetic variance. That genetic variance is what makes your children distinct, and it is added onto you and your spouse’s unique genetic variance and the all the genetic variance of every ancestor you and your spouse descended from going back millions of years to the first organism. Could this be why Heaven is represented as being inhabited by all your ancestors who have died?
Conversely, Hell could be described as the consequence for inhibiting the survival of the species. By failing to procreate, you remove yourself from the collective genetic sequence of humanity. By inhibiting successful procreation by others, either indirectly by engaging in corrupt behavior or directly by murder, you start down the path to hell, both in terms of the worldly consequences of your actions (landing in jail, alienating loved ones, falling into civil war, etc.) and the evolutionary consequences of pushing the species closer to extinction. By killing yourself, you not only remove yourself from the gene pool, but you are also actively rejecting a life that was made possible by the combined perserverance of every single organism you are descended from going back to the beginning of life on Earth. Things may seem hard in your life, but there’s a good chance they were harder for one of your millions of ancestors who chose not to kill themselves.
As such, heaven and hell are metaphors for survival and extinction respectively, but they are also metaphors for the conditions we can experience in our earthly lives. Heaven is what could be described as the ideal life here on Earth. Heaven is different for everyone, but always explained in worldly terms. For me, heaven is the presence of the friends and family whom I love, the freedom to explore the world and connect with nature, the ability to pursue meaningful careers and hobbies, and the privilege to watch my children grow up and surpass the ideal I’m trying my best to represent for them. Hell is also explained in worldly terms. The classic Victorian depiction of hell involves fire, brimstone, pitchforks, and demons, but it falls far short of the real world examples we’ve recorded throughout history. The concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the gulags of Communist Russia, the streets of Rwanda during its civil war, the shores of Normandy on D-Day, the work camps of North Korea; these weren’t merely approximations to hell — they were hell. In other words, not only do heaven and hell exist, there are people there right now, as you read this, in the physical world.
Religion prescribes rules for entering Heaven and avoiding Hell, but I do not believe they are not human inventions but universal natural laws of nature governing behavior that evolved over millions of years and must be discovered. Like the rules that dictate the behaviors of individual ants in a larger colony, they’re the rules that when followed give us as individuals and as a species the best possible chance for eternal survival. Why is it then that some people seem to get away with breaking a lot of the rules and still end up being successful from a material and an evolutionary perspective? It seems unfair and contradictory. From a Darwinist perspective, however, it makes a lot more sense.
We are unable to follow all the rules all the time. Were we able to, we would be animals, not humans, much like Adam before eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It is our free will that gives us the ability to pick and choose which of the fundamental rules for living we follow.
Unlike animals, we are not ruled by our instincts. We can go against our nature in order to adapt to our changing environments. Rules are important. They provide order and consistency amidst chaos. However, breaking rules is also important. It is what frees us from the stifling tyranny of order. Breaking too many of the fundamental rules could lead to our extinction, but adhering to a set of behaviors too rigidly will prevent us from properly adapting to the ever changing environment, also leading to our extinction. The trick is, it seems, to find the right balance between order and chaos — a theme well articulated by Taoism.
This pursuit of this balance is the pursuit of truth. God is the ultimate representation of truth. Jesus reveals as much: “I am the Way and the *Truth* and the Life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” Therefore, to seek the truth is to seek God. From the Darwinist perspective, “truth” is that which perpetuates the species; it is the environment we live in, the mechanisms by which we procreate, the universe we are bound by, the consciousness we are cursed with, and the genetics we are defined by.
Because we cannot empirically discover truths about how to live, we must rely on faith. Faith always seemed to me like the antithesis of truth, but I now realize we could not possibly survive without it. We rely on faith every day. We put our faith in the systems we’ve constructed to keep us safe, provide us with power, water, sewage and waste removal, etc. We put our faith in the experts that understand concepts that would take us a lifetime to master. We put our faith in the people driving opposite us on a two-lane highway. We put our faith in the correctness of our scientific hypotheses, as we did with the super hadron collider — the most expensive and time-consuming scientific experiment of all time. Faith isn’t blind belief in the unproven. Faith bridges the gap between our empirical confidence and our uncertainty. Faith sustains our conviction when our rational justifications have reached their limit. Faith is our willingness to stand up for the truth in the face of great opposition and the threat of suffering.
Just as in science, the discovery of moral truths is difficult and unending. Certain rules have become solidified over time, but we are continually discovering new rules and altering existing ones. Those who lean towards conscientiousness and extroversion enforce the rules we’ve currently agreed on. Those who tend toward openness and neuroticism challenge existing rules and propose new ones. In fact, Jesus was a prolific rule breaker and it is what led to his demise. Of course, he had the benefit of having perfect knowledge of all the rules, but by standing up for the truth in the face of unimaginable suffering, he showed us that the truth is the ultimate path to salvation. He represents the archetypal hero; the ideal that we all must strive to become.
It is the most important lesson in the Bible. It teaches us to protect rule breakers and trouble makers, because like Jesus, they could be our only path out of darkness. It teaches us to have faith in that which we know to be true regardless of the pressures that might be put upon us to deny it. That is, if you are one of those rule breakers and you have found the truth, it is your responsibility to maintain your faith in it no matter how much suffering you are forced to endure. Essentially, what it’s telling us is that the only thing that matters is that which results in the perpetuation of our species. Nothing else is as true. It’s an incredibly powerful and beautiful concept. It’s the foundation upon which the United States was founded on, and the reason why it became the beacon of freedom and prosperity throughout the world. The further we fall away from our core principles, the worse off we will become.
You might argue that science is the definition of the pursuit of truth, and from a rationalist, material perspective you would be right. However, those truths must somehow improve our species’ chance of survival, otherwise they are meaningless. Discovering how to split the atom may be true from a physical, Newtonian frame of reference, but if it ends up destroying the entire species it ends up being false from a metaphysical, Darwinist frame of reference. This is why we must reevaluate our blind faith in science and return some of our focus to the humanities—return our focus to humans. When we discovered the hadron, we were presented with yet another particle to split apart. More empty truths to pursue. More pointless questions to answer. When we discover moral truths, we move closer to understanding the very meaning of life. Science can help us get there, but eventually we have to take a leap of faith.
